andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-362 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Here are my answers to the following questions asked by Pauline Peretz: 1. Many analysts have emphasized that there was a redrawing of the electoral map in 2008. To what extent will the November midterm elections affect this red-blue map? How long will the newly blue states remain blue? 2. Do you think the predictable loss of the Democrats in November definitely disqualifies the hypothesis that Obama’s election was the beginning of a realignment in American politics, that is a period of dominance for the Democratic party due to favourable demographics? 3. Some analysts consider that voting patterns are best explained by economic factors, others by values. How do you position yourself in the debate on culture wars vs. economic wars? 4. In your book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, you renew the ongoing debate on the correlation between income and vote, showing it is much stronger in poor states. In light of this correlation, would you say that there currently is
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1 Here are my answers to the following questions asked by Pauline Peretz: 1. [sent-1, score-0.083]
2 Many analysts have emphasized that there was a redrawing of the electoral map in 2008. [sent-2, score-0.739]
3 To what extent will the November midterm elections affect this red-blue map? [sent-3, score-0.412]
4 Do you think the predictable loss of the Democrats in November definitely disqualifies the hypothesis that Obama’s election was the beginning of a realignment in American politics, that is a period of dominance for the Democratic party due to favourable demographics? [sent-6, score-0.733]
5 Some analysts consider that voting patterns are best explained by economic factors, others by values. [sent-8, score-0.542]
6 How do you position yourself in the debate on culture wars vs. [sent-9, score-0.492]
7 In your book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, you renew the ongoing debate on the correlation between income and vote, showing it is much stronger in poor states. [sent-12, score-0.801]
8 In light of this correlation, would you say that there currently is an increasing economic polarization in American politics? [sent-13, score-0.575]
9 To what extent do you think internal mobility and the geographical concentration of like-minded voters (in some sort of “self-sorting” mechanism) increases the polarization of American politics? [sent-15, score-1.022]
10 No, I don’t know what was going on with my hair that day. [sent-18, score-0.129]
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Introduction: Here are my answers to the following questions asked by Pauline Peretz: 1. Many analysts have emphasized that there was a redrawing of the electoral map in 2008. To what extent will the November midterm elections affect this red-blue map? How long will the newly blue states remain blue? 2. Do you think the predictable loss of the Democrats in November definitely disqualifies the hypothesis that Obama’s election was the beginning of a realignment in American politics, that is a period of dominance for the Democratic party due to favourable demographics? 3. Some analysts consider that voting patterns are best explained by economic factors, others by values. How do you position yourself in the debate on culture wars vs. economic wars? 4. In your book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, you renew the ongoing debate on the correlation between income and vote, showing it is much stronger in poor states. In light of this correlation, would you say that there currently is
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
Introduction: Matthew Yglesias noticed something interesting in a political story today that reminds me of one of our arguments in Red State, Blue State. I have the feeling that most readers of this blog are less fascinated than I am by U.S. politics, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. Yglesias quotes a Washington Post article on Blanche Lincoln returning to the U.S. Senate after surviving a primary challenge from a candidate supported by organized labor: Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.” Yglesias points out a fundamental asymmetry here: Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal [of governing in a manner that's equidistant from rival interest groups], but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party–much less a leader–who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basi
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Introduction: The fun part of this entry comes near the end. Amanda Marcotte has some nice things to say about Red State, Blue State and connects our findings with some current political conflicts. She picks up on our theme of perception and reality, that national journalists live in a different world and can have difficulty grasping national voting patterns: The book definitively answers the perplexing question of our time, which is, “Why do poor people in red states vote against their economic interests?” The answer is, quite simply, they don’t. There is no paradox. To quote Gelman: “If poor people were a state, they would be ‘bluer’ even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be as ‘red’ as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.” Of course, I don’t think the stereotype of tea baggers have ever been that they’re poor. But I do think there’s a supposition that they’re lower or middle middle class, and not well-educated. That’s based on the illiterate signage, t
5 0.18730558 1635 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-22-More Pinker Pinker Pinker
Introduction: After I posted this recent comment on a blog of Steven Pinker (see also here ), we had the following exchange. I’m reposting it here (with Pinker’s agreement) not because we achieved any deep insights but because I thought it useful to reveal to people that so-called experts such as us are not so clear on these issues either. AG: I noticed your article on red and blue states and had some thoughts. . . . The short summary is that I think that your idea is interesting but that, as stated, it explains too much, in that your story is based on centuries-long history but it only fits electoral patterns since the 1980s. SP: Though the exact alignment between red and blue states, political parties, and particular issues surely shift, I’d be surprised if the basic alignments between geography and the right-left divide, and the issues that cluster on each side of the divide, have radically changed over the past century. (Obviously if you define “red” and “blue” by the Republican
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Introduction: Here are my answers to the following questions asked by Pauline Peretz: 1. Many analysts have emphasized that there was a redrawing of the electoral map in 2008. To what extent will the November midterm elections affect this red-blue map? How long will the newly blue states remain blue? 2. Do you think the predictable loss of the Democrats in November definitely disqualifies the hypothesis that Obama’s election was the beginning of a realignment in American politics, that is a period of dominance for the Democratic party due to favourable demographics? 3. Some analysts consider that voting patterns are best explained by economic factors, others by values. How do you position yourself in the debate on culture wars vs. economic wars? 4. In your book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, you renew the ongoing debate on the correlation between income and vote, showing it is much stronger in poor states. In light of this correlation, would you say that there currently is
Introduction: Matthew Yglesias noticed something interesting in a political story today that reminds me of one of our arguments in Red State, Blue State. I have the feeling that most readers of this blog are less fascinated than I am by U.S. politics, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. Yglesias quotes a Washington Post article on Blanche Lincoln returning to the U.S. Senate after surviving a primary challenge from a candidate supported by organized labor: Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.” Yglesias points out a fundamental asymmetry here: Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal [of governing in a manner that's equidistant from rival interest groups], but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party–much less a leader–who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basi
Introduction: Conservative data cruncher Charles Murray asks , “Why aren’t Asians Republicans?”: Asians are only half as likely to identify themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative” as whites, and less than half as likely to identify themselves as Republicans. . . . 70% of Asians voted for Barack Obama in the last presidential election. Something’s wrong with this picture. . . . Everyday observation of Asians around the world reveal them to be conspicuously entrepreneurial, industrious, family-oriented, and self-reliant. If you’re looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define “natural.” . . . Asian immigrants overwhelmingly succeeded, another experience that tends to produce conservative immigrants. Beyond that, Asian minorities everywhere in the world, including America, tend to be underrepresented in politics—they’re more interested in getting ahead commercially or in non-political professions than in running for office or organizing advocacy groups. La
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Introduction: After our discussions of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s opinions about working-class voters (see here and here ), a question arose on how to reconcile the analyses of Alan Abramowitz and Tom Edsall (showing an increase in Republican voting among low-education working white southerners), with Larry Bartels’s finding that “there has been no discernible trend in presidential voting behavior among the ‘working white working class.’” Here is my resolution: All the statistics that have been posted seem reasonable to me. Also relevant to the discussion, I believe, are Figures 3.1, 4.2b, 10.1, and 10.2 of Red State Blue State. In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes
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Introduction: So asks James Ledbetter in Slate. And the answer is . . . No! Here’s what happened in 2008: OK, that’s how people vote. How bout party identification and ideology? Check these out : (Click on image to see larger version.) And here it is, sliced a different way : Of, if you want to see it in map form, check out this article (with Daniel and Yair). P.S. A skeptic might comment that the above graphs, which are based on national poll data, only break down incomes to the top 5% or so. What about the truly rich. Here are my thoughts on the political attitudes of the super-rich. P.P.S. Ledbetter actually makes some good points in his article, which is about the campaign contributions of rich Americans. The article relies on a recent book by David Callahan, which seems to echo the work of Tom Ferguson (cited in the above-linked blog entry), who’s tracked campaign contributions by industry over many years. I think that Ferguson (and Callahan) a
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Introduction: Kaiser nails it . The offending article , by John Tierney, somehow ended up in the Science section rather than the Opinion section. As an opinion piece (or, for that matter, a blog), Tierney’s article would be nothing special. But I agree with Kaiser that it doesn’t work as a newspaper article. As Kaiser notes, this story involves a bunch of statistical and empirical claims that are not well resolved by P.R. and rhetoric.
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Introduction: Here are my answers to the following questions asked by Pauline Peretz: 1. Many analysts have emphasized that there was a redrawing of the electoral map in 2008. To what extent will the November midterm elections affect this red-blue map? How long will the newly blue states remain blue? 2. Do you think the predictable loss of the Democrats in November definitely disqualifies the hypothesis that Obama’s election was the beginning of a realignment in American politics, that is a period of dominance for the Democratic party due to favourable demographics? 3. Some analysts consider that voting patterns are best explained by economic factors, others by values. How do you position yourself in the debate on culture wars vs. economic wars? 4. In your book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, you renew the ongoing debate on the correlation between income and vote, showing it is much stronger in poor states. In light of this correlation, would you say that there currently is
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Introduction: . . . and I decided to amuse myself by writing down all the management-speak words I heard: “grappling” “early prototypes” “technology platform” “building block” “machine learning” “your team” “workspace” “tagging” “data exhaust” “monitoring a particular population” “collective intelligence” “communities of practice” “hackathon” “human resources . . . technologies” Any one or two or three of these phrases might be fine, but put them all together and what you have is a festival of jargon. A hackathon, indeed.
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Introduction: After hearing a few times about the divorce predictions of researchers John Gottman and James Murray (work that was featured in Blink with a claim that they could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced–after meeting with them for 15 minutes) and feeling some skepticism , I decided to do the Lord’s work and amend Gottman’s wikipedia entry, which had a paragraph saying: Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57
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Introduction: After blogging on quirky software pioneer Richard Stallman , I thought it appropriate to write something about recently deceased quirky software pioneer John McCarthy, who, with the exception of being bearded, seems like he was the personal and political opposite of Stallman. Here’s a page I found of Stallman McCarthy quotes (compiled by Neil Craig). It’s a mixture of the reasonable and the unreasonable (ok, I suppose the same could be said of this blog!). I wonder if he and Stallman ever met and, if so, whether they had an extended conversation. It would be like matter and anti-matter! P.S. I flipped through McCarthy’s pages and found one of my pet peeves. See item 3 here , which sounds so plausible but is in fact not true (at least, not according to the National Election Study). As McCarthy’s Stanford colleague Mo Fiorina can tell you, otherwise well-informed people believe all sorts of things about polarization that aren’t so. Labeling groups of Americans as “
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